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Tackling the Patrix
Gaia U explores being a Re-Evaluation Counseling Community
 Gaia University has recently been authorized to develop a non-geographical Re-Evaluation Counseling (RC) community within its network. This experimental project offers Gaia University associates access to a unique tool with which to explore and heal themselves, their communities, and the world at large, becoming more effective in the world change work in which they are engaged. Re-Evaluation Counseling’s global network is generally based on geographic boundaries. However, given the pioneering work of Gaia U in often remote locations and the challenges its international associates face in finding local RC Fundamentals courses, RC International has decided to allow courses to be offered in conjunction with Gaia U Orientation programs.
About RC
RC is a process whereby people of all ages and backgrounds exchange effective help in order to free themselves from the effects of past distress experiences.
The theory behind RC provides a model of human interaction. It assumes that everyone is born with tremendous intellectual potential, natural zest, and lovingness; but that these qualities have become blocked and obscured in adults as the result of accumulated distress experiences (fear, hurt, loss, pain, anger, embarrassment, etc.) which begin early in our lives.
According to the theory, a young person would normally recover from distress spontaneously through emotional discharge (crying, trembling, raging, laughing, etc.). However, this natural process is usually interfered with by well-meaning people ("Don't cry," "Be a big boy," etc.) who erroneously equate the emotional discharge (the healing of the hurt) with the hurt itself.
When adequate emotional discharge can take place, the person is freed from the rigid pattern of behavior and feeling left by the hurt. The basic loving, cooperative, intelligent, and zestful nature is then free to operate. Such a person will tend to be more effective in looking out for his or her own interests and the interests of others, and will be more capable of acting successfully against injustice.
In recovering and using the natural discharge process, two people take turns counseling and being counseled. The one acting as the counselor listens, draws the other out and permits, encourages, and assists emotional discharge. The one acting as client talks and discharges and re-evaluates. With experience and increased confidence and trust in each other, the process works better and better.
Connection to Gaia U work on the Patrix*:
*all forms of oppression - the “ism’s
While Re-evaluation Counseling (RC) offers Gaia U associates a method for dealing with the re-stimulation of old wounds and pain that can hinder the effectiveness of their work as world changers, the technique also offers unique methods for revealing and eliminating the Patrix.
 Andrew Langford, co-founder of Gaia University International explained that GUI is, within the eco-social regeneration field, focused on understanding all forms of oppression including internalized oppression. These, bundled together, form what he calls “The Patrix” which includes racism, sexism, classism, ageism, etc. Langford suggests, “Even now, at the start of our RC community building efforts we are able to go after these major issues with clear insight, and with an effective tool to diminish their insidious effects.”
He offered this story to further explain:
“This is a story from when I came to understand I wanted to work as a world changer. I spent several years working in junior management in a piecework factory system in my early 20’s – this is very dehumanizing work for all concerned. I was separated from those working on the factory floor because I was in management and, so the thinking went, it would compromise my position if I was to have social connections with the workers. The experience gave me first hand insight into how classism creates artificial separation and in this case, for me, it gave rise to an acute sense of isolation. I couldn’t become friends with the workers, join in their singing on the factory floor and, if we met in town, I was supposed to more or less ignore them. In any case they regarded me with considerable suspicion, as one of the ‘enemy’. At the time I had no way to think intellgently about the issues and certainly no mechanism on board to deal with the intense sense of grief and loss I felt in this situation.
I knew that I had to find a different way of making a living and so, when I was made redundant during the downsizing that followed the 70’s oil price spike, I started a workshop scale manufacturing business in part specifically to avoid the worker/management separation issues I had disliked so much before. However bootstrapping a start-up, especially one that was seeking to go against the mainstream tide of globalization, brought its own set of stresses and strains and again I felt an intense isolation as I struggled to earn enough for the needs of my young family – it seemed to me that I would have been failing in my responsibilities as a husband and father if I had not worked every possible hour, if not in the business, then on our small-holding growing food. We were running the household on wood-heat too, to save money, so there was always logging (from felling to splitting) to do if nothing else. I became exhausted from the sheer hard work, compromised my contact with my close family due to the long hours and, again, I had no useful ways of thinking about what was going on and no support to deal with the emotional issues arising.
Then, in the 80’s, when I first encountered Permaculture my spirits lifted as I realized that I was not alone in seeking to invent a more social and ecological future for people and planet. I stepped up to the challenge and became a full time permaculture designer. Now though, if before I was swimming against the tide, I felt as if I had stepped out of a minor coastal current into the full force of an ocean swell. Nearly everybody else, besides the very small few of us in the 80’s who could see how human societies were destroying their foundations, thought I was crazy. These folk did not hold back with their views either. Each time I spoke for eco-social regeneration on a platform somewhere I’d attract someone’s anger, someone would react vehemently against my calls for the need for change. And, meanwhile I was looking at the global indicators on resource depletion like soil erosion and the consequent loss of food growing capacity. I was seeing data that predicted disaster on a large scale, data that I’d never seen before. It felt very overwhelming. Even the people who agreed with the thinking would tell me that what I was doing was hopeless – I often felt like giving up.
It was during these early days in permaculture, that E, who worked with me at the time, gently led me towards the RC process. Each day, upon her arrival in the office, she would ask me what was going well in my life and what I found challenging. I thought this was a bizarre way to start the day, but it helped me deal with the bits of spume flying off the waves of hopelessness that were crashing around in my head and, after half an hour of this, I’d have enough attention to do the day’s work well.
Also during this time, when I was taking leadership roles in the movement, very distressed people who might have thought of themselves as our allies, would make long telephone calls to me and complain at length by telling me that we just weren’t working fast enough, that we weren’t being successful in turning around the mainstream overnight. They would be quite angry with me and I would first feel terribly guilty about letting them down and then deeply resentful that they couldn’t see that I was doing the very best I could with the time and resources to hand. These events would often push me into episodes of deep depression – I’d be damned if I didn’t and damned if I did and I could see no way out and might feel ill for days after.
When talking with E about this, she let me know that she was part of the RC community, and, according to the thinking there what I was experiencing was called, “Leadership Attack’ and that I was definitely not at fault for the way the world was going – indeed she let me know how pleased she was that I was working for change. This made refreshing sense to me and so, intrigued, I did an RC introductory evening she organized and then the Fundamentals course which is the 30 hour practitioner training all RC people do when they start.
Well, it was as if the scales were lifted from my eyes. I finally had an effective way of healing the depression, isolation and despair I was personally feeling and I had a flexible way of thinking that enabled me to see at last the dense web of oppressions that were shaping the destructive way the mainstream was developing. Not only that but RC introduced me to a robust theory and practice of liberation that empowers all oppressed people to work on their own re-emergence independently of whether or not their oppressors cease to function. I already had the idea, from Kurt Lewin, that there is nothing quite so practical as a good theory so I jumped on this one from RC and have been active ever since and my life has improved immeasurably as a result.
How is this relevant to Gaia U?
 I realized that if I want to work on challenging world scale problems, I need to construct a field of support around me consisting of other people who are willing to get into good shape emotionally - that I can contribute directly to building a community of people ready to step up to the social and emotional challenges of regenerating our societies ready to balance up with the good folk who can do the technical stuff. Indeed, these days in Gaia U we are working to develop people who have both these sides on board so that out technical work is always informed by our understanding of the often hidden and dysfunctional social dynamics that we find in the field.
Secondly I experienced an unleashing of energy and intelligence the more I used the RC discharge process. I became much more mentally alert, got a lot of flexibility back into my thinking, and discovered that knowing how to discharge any distress that might come up in the field allows me to step into more edgy situations and look at larger and larger scale problems without having a big emotional response overwhelm me. I can think about the crises we are facing as a species, without hitting that hopelessness place to hard and for too long. I can discharge the hopelessness that comes up and then find fresh, constructive steps to move forward. I think this is a tool many of us in the world change arena would like to have, especially as life conditions intensify over the coming years.”
Andrew went on to suggest another benefit of RC to Gaia U associates. “Through RC we will be completely alert to the possibility that in every project we find ourselves working, the Patrix will be running. Indeed our capacity to see it in action, in ourselves, in other people and embedded in the institutions of our culture will be enhanced a great deal. Then there’s more opportunity for us to consciously decrease its power and it will be more possible to invoke designs that will be less influenced by and less compromised by the Patrix.”
He continued, “The Patrix is a bundle of memes, powerful ones like racism and sexism, and we know they have an enormous capacity to replicate generation after generation and in culture after culture. It’s the continual playing out of the Patrix that is bringing us to the brink of human disaster. I’d like us in Gaia U, in association with the thousands of rc activists out there, to be able to step up to the challenge and say “Right now this is where the meme-buck stops and it stops with us!”
http://www.rc.org/
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